


Bizarre Bone

by CptRedder



Category: Dragon Marked For Death (Video Game)
Genre: POV First Person, Short Story, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:40:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26538235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CptRedder/pseuds/CptRedder
Summary: An intimate night in Litus quickly turns sour with the evocation of a lingering spirit.Disclaimer:Dragon Marked For Death and all of its characters, locations, etc. belong to Inti Creates. The characters featured in this story are derivative characters.Content Warnings for violence. [T Rating]
Kudos: 1





	Bizarre Bone

Rocinoll and me, we trace our fingers against the plaster sandstone wall, the peeling material sticking to our skins as we trek deeper down the hallway. The tapping on the floor reverberates lightly against her rubber-metal boots, my stone-strong dragons of legs. Through the rectangularly-carved windows, the purple illumination of the Litus night seizes at our feet. And I’m about to reach my hand out to grab hers when she stops in front of a decaying ironwood door and takes her palm to push against my chest behind her. She has a thin, long smoking pipe in her other hand.  


“Hold on,” she breathes to me. “I need to make sure there are no bad spirits in here.” Because of where she stopped, the light from the window reflects on her goggles in a perfectly opaque, white glow.  


Rocinoll brings the pipe up above her head, along with a small sack. And on her head, the pink dragon mutation, shaped like a wide-brimmed hat with jagged teeth and dim red eyes, it extends its two antennas into giant hands. One hand grabs the pipe, while the other, pinch by pinch, reaches into the small sack and loads the pipe with powder.  


Wrapped in my brown cloak, my bandana bunched up over my mouth and around my neck, I stay behind looking at her and the windows as she pushes open the door. With the pipe near her lips, shiny lips, she says, “Don’t come in yet, Dan, but watch your hair when you’re under the doorframe.”  


I nod. Oh, I actually knew a bad spirit once. But he’s not here anymore. She doesn’t need to do this, but I can’t stop her. Saying “no” doesn’t sound like a good first word, after all. Besides, it’s not like the smoke treatment ever worked. Or maybe it did. I really want to think it did, you know, because you wanna think your girlfriend’s right when she takes the lead for you so it’s not like you’re just hanging back from the game, but that you actually said yes. Anyway, the important thing is seeing her smile after she does it right. I want that smile. And if I can’t make her smile with my voice then I’ll make her smile with myself.  


I turn to the wall and see the lavender illumination cast the shadow of my hair like a long, ghostly waterfall flowing upwards. The sharp edges of my legs’ mutations glitter purple with the stars through the windows. And Rocinoll steps into the room, keeping the door ajar as her tapping recedes inside. Dust clouds follow under her feet.  


Compared to the desert morning, the night, it’s cool enough that I don’t need to worry about my fingers melting off when I place their tips on the cracked windowsill. The edges of my claws shine, white dots against black. Below here, structural wooden poles extrude from the walls. And below that, a giant yellow-and-orange banner stretches over the cobblestone walkway underneath, but the night bathes it in a soft blue.  


It’s late enough that all the other tenants in this building are sleeping, but I hold my breath to see if I can hear the harp.  


Listen.  


The harp, Rocinoll told me, rings out in this exact area on some nights. She thinks it’s a spirit’s doing. She never told me if it were a good or a bad one, but I wanna take her word for it because she’s Rocinoll. She has to be right because I can’t vocalize my word anyway.  


Listen.  


One time, the last time we slept here, I woke up in my sleep, in the middle of the night, because for a second I didn’t feel a body next to me. And me, I was too sleepy to tell, but I’m pretty sure I saw Rocinoll standing outside the window to listen to the harp. And yeah, way before back then my peers in the dojo called me “Elephant Ears Dande,” but really, I couldn’t hear anything, or I just had too much earwax. Rocinoll, it looked like she was floating, standing well offset from the sill, enough that I couldn’t see her lower body, couldn’t see the black-and-white striped socks pulled up to her thighs and her heels click-clacking with her right in front of her left, like a cat. Or maybe I thought she was floating because that’s what her magic can do. But really, she was just standing on the poles, balancing. The silhouette of her dragon hat, violet against the midnight Litus sky, it remained perfectly still as she stared out into the cosmos.  


Now, listen.  


In my head, I tell myself, listen.  


Listen to the harp. But I don’t hear it.  


Instead, the night breeze delivers to me the sound of Rocinoll exhaling in our room behind me. I can taste the smoke. She incants a quick four-note spell and a white light shines from beyond the ajar door.  


I pull my cloak over my shoulders and rest my elbows on the sill. Listen: I have no idea where the harp came from. And listen: I’m always jealous of guys who can play music. Guys like my dead father, guys like my dead boyfriend Ena, who played the jaw harp, which makes that boing-ing sound when you flick the thin wooden stick. But I always broke it. Each time I put it to my mouth and flicked it, I’d flick it too hard and it’d snap. It’d make a nasty, thin snap. So no way was I gonna play it again, no way. Singing didn’t really work for me either. My peers in the dojo, they said I looked like a chicken-stick with an elephant’s ears, the legs of a horse, and the voice of a snake. So that’s how I know to better shut myself up before I grate somebody’s eardrums.  


So the next morning, after that incident which I thought was a dream, I found Rocinoll sleeping on the giant fallen Litus banner below. And hours later, I had to pick her up from the Divine Knights surveying over Litus after a lengthy questioning on her antic.  


It was an accident.  


We both concluded it was a bad spirit’s fault.  


For a long time, in the stuffy air underneath the shade of the sandstone, I stared at her sleeping on the fallen banner with her arm extended over as if she were embracing something I couldn’t see. Chronically-sleepy me, I barely saw her gentle self curled over on her side through the sand crusted in my eyes.  


Other than the fact that she fell, I think about that a lot, how her arm was stretched over like that. Because you’d wanna think she’s thinking about you.  


I wanted to jump after her, onto the banner dipped under her weight, but upon landing that would’ve caused the stakes holding up the banner to straight-up collapse. And I could have slid down the wall to grab her up, but the impression on the sunken banner would’ve been too obvious. Besides, by the time I slapped myself awake and jumped onto the sill, extending the wings of my legs, ready to dive after her, the Divine Knights were already hoisting ladders and taking her down while she was just about arising, and I had to run down to the Litus capital to pick her up. No, actually, I had to repair the banner setup and the stakes, and then run to the Litus capital to pick her up. But really, that’s all fine. For someone like me, it’s better to act than to talk.  


Like, the way I had to tell the Knights, I’d have needed a piece of paper and a pen, but they gave me a slab of rock and a chisel instead. And our two other groupmates, Milan and Alouette, they were away doing their own quests so we could get our fortunes up. So Rocinoll was sitting between two Knights with their swords planted on the ground in front of them, and to me she swayed her fingers back and forth, mouthing some words so I wouldn’t write something stupid like she was trying to chase the stars, or something bad like she was trying to kill herself.  


The harp tune, that had to be included in the explanation. It wasn’t a jaw harp, but it was the kind made of metal or wood with the big long strings going vertical. The way her mouth moved, Rocinoll either meant “ghost” or “toast,” and toasty was how I was feeling having to write on that slab in the sunniest area of the meeting room.  


In my head, looking at the cosmos, I repeat, it was an accident. And it was a bad spirit’s fault. That’s why she insists on the smoke treatment, even though we’ve been here before. Her mother used to do it to keep away bad spirits. That’s what she tells me, at least.  


It was an accident. It was a ghost. A bad spirit’s fault.  


With the tip of my claw, I pretend to write that on the sill. And I don’t press too hard or else it’ll sound like high-pitched screeching. Losing this moment to that would suck harder than my dead boyfriend Ena on my bone—and that’s in the bad way.  


Like, I miss Ena, my partner back in the dojo. He was the last person I’ve ever spoken to. But sometimes I feel some cool sensation coming down my neck, like fingers walking down my back, that maybe his spirit’s watching us and doing funny things. That’s fine, probably. Ghosts aren’t new to me.  


Behind me, in our room, Rocinoll starts humming one of the local desert tunes. Her shoes, they click around the clay floor as she swirls around the smoke with her cute white stick of a wand. While she’s doing this, I retract my claws, pull the front of my bandana down, and stick three fingers to my throat. But when I try to push, it feels like the back of my windpipe’s shoving up with mucus, and only some nasty growling sound comes out. It can’t sound as good as her music, no more, no way.  


Oh, I was born with vocal cords. But I can’t use them because of my pact, after I killed Ena because the Astral Dragon Atruum told me to. Listen: it was part of my duty as a Shinobi, the killing part. But the pact, it’s not a magic thing. Or even to sound smart and poetic, it’s not a horse bridle and clamp over my mouth. I just wanted to stop talking because after that moment, after speaking to myself in the Marlayus bamboo forests with his dead body in my arms and no one else, really, my voice’s more sickening than kissing an occasional magic smoker… Not that I don’t like kissing Rocinoll.  


But if I said nothing, Ena would still be alive.  


We’d be together and living in Marlayus.  


The pact’s not much of a religious thing anymore if you think about it like that.  


Leaning over on the sill, I turn my head to the door. I catch sight of Rocinoll’s goggles at the perfect time and she waves her hands out in front of her. “Not yet!” she hisses at me, smiling but with her eyebrows somehow brooding. She sneezes and the smoke dispels to her sides. I smile back at her with my mouth hidden under my bandana.  


A bad spirit told me one time that I’ve done it once. I can do it again. After I stopped speaking almost a year ago, I’m just waiting for something to go wrong. Something for me to mess up. And because of what happened with Ena, with my tattle-tale snake voice, just like before, I know I can mess up again.  


I’m mouthing words to myself. Rocinoll, Ena, Rocinoll. The words dance silently in my mouth, just like her in our room with the blessed smoke.  


This one time in Medius I was preparing my bag with the group’s medicines and herbs, relics and powders, when I heard Rocinoll and Milan talking in the middle room. This was back when Rocinoll and me slept on bunk beds instead of just one together, so I’m on the bottom bunk listening in and they can’t hear me because I breathe pretty low. And Rocinoll comes fluttering in to get a snack of corn before we go when Milan asks, “Hey, Roci?”  


And with her mouth full she says, “Mm?”  


I slink closer to the doorframe and Milan’s sitting on a wooden chair, backwards, crossing his arms and facing her with a funny smirk on his face. “Been thinking a lot about Dande, huh?” he teases.  


“Mebbe,” she replies. She swallows then says, “I think he’s great, actually!”  


The way Rocinoll eats corn, she holds the cob upright with a fist, then scrapes off the kernels with her bottom teeth. It’s supposed to make things less messy, her mother told her.  


And Milan sighs and asks, “So you guys are actually together?”  


Between bites, Rocinoll replies, “Mmhm!” She replies, “I really like ‘im!”  


Milan grimaces and asks, “And he can’t talk?”  


And she bites. “He just doesn’t talk,” she tells him.  


Then Milan rubs his left eye with the back of his fingers, shifts himself so the giant blue dragon mutation of his chest wiggles a bit, and asks, “You actually fell in love with a guy who can’t even tell you that he loves you?”  


Listen.  


When Rocinoll and me started getting together, I wrote that I loved her on a piece of paper, but that can’t really count I don’t think.  


Rocinoll gulps down, holding up her half-finished cob, looking at Milly. And with me still standing by the doorway, staring at how nice her long split-in-two-in-the-back hair is and how soft and small her hands are, holding the cob, while she’s sitting on the chair, I really hate how hard my heartbeat’s getting. And then she turns the cob horizontally and continues chomping on it. “For sherioush!” she tells him.  


He swerves his eyes from left to right like he’s chasing some invisible fly because maybe his big brother act isn’t working, and then he says, “And you’ve known each other for—”  


“Shix months,” she replies.  


“Six months.”  


She hums. “He’s great, he’s great,” she insists. “He’s great… And I think you feel the same about Alouette, right, Milly?”  


And she doesn’t realize how much of a pang that gave Milly, that him nearly falling off his chair wasn’t because of some bad spirit she forgot to exorcise.  


Back in Litus, I’m about to doze off with my head leaning over on the windowsill and my eyes drooping when Rocinoll’s tapping gets super loud and she grabs me by the sides of my cloak. “Dan!” she exclaims, hugging me from behind. “The place’s good to go.”  


I linger a bit to feel her more. She mumbles something and I’m waiting for her to go to the front to check on me, so when she does I take her by the shoulders and kiss her on the forehead. Her face turns pink and she lets out a laugh, but the way it trails off sounds a little tired, like her volume’s tied to a weight. She gazes out the window at the great purple desert with its suspended, pillar-mounted, vertically-reflected pyramids, then she reaches under my cloak and tugs on my hand, saying, “Let’s go, Dan.”  


We go into the room and close the ironwood door behind us. She had left her wand on the bed with the tip of it still glowing, so she heads over to pick it up. There’s no more smoke. She asks me if she should light up some candles but I shake my head. Her wand, the stars, and she are… pretty enough.  


“No? Okay then,” she tells me, “but I gotta keep this light on since I’m still cleaning up.” On the bed, next to her wand lies the smoking pipe and its sack of powder. I motion towards the pipe and take a cleaning rag out of my own bag, but she waves me off and insists she’ll handle it.  


Six months, plus four and a half more together since then. This Litus half-Dragonblood girl’s been with me—some shy, spindly Marlayus Dragonblood Shinobi, probably the last one—for that long, even though she’s never heard a word come out of my mouth. Except for two weeks last month, she was held hostage by the Dragonblood bandit Hírondel. That’s what the record said, at least: she was the hostage of the infamous yellow-horned serial killer Hírondel. He or she, I don’t know. But Rocinoll told me that it was an accident, how Hírondel pulled her into their black cloak and teleported the two of them to who knows where. Listen: an accident. And listen: I don’t know what they did during that time. But what matters is that she got out of there safe and sound.  


She’s been a lot more soundless since then, though.  


And maybe I still have too much earwax, but I still can’t hear anything. I still can’t say anything. We’re sleeping in the same bed together now, and I still can’t ask her, vocally, what’s going on in her mind. What went on back then.  


I take my cloak off and fold it, then place it next to my pillow on the opposite side of the bed. Milan and Alouette are out tomb-raiding; we won’t be able to rendezvous until tomorrow morning. We’re alone together here. And it’s been a while since the last time we had this opportunity.  


So here I am, sitting on the opposite side of the bed, unwrapping the combat bandages on my arms slowly and quietly so I can hear what she’s doing behind me. With no bad spirit to hold me down, I’m re-rolling the words in my mouth. Rocinoll, Rocinoll, Rocinoll, swaying in my mouth like the enchanted smoke from earlier. It’s pouring through the small gaps of my teeth and trying to escape for each layer I unwrap. And after many months, after many rolls, “Rocinoll” definitely sounds like a good first word.  


I finish unwrapping, but as I'm about to stand and cross to her side, she pauses her humming and her cleaning. She stays like this for a while. The only time she breaks it is when her wand starts dimming out, so she replenishes it with a soft four-note chant. Then she glances at me for a second and nods her head, so I sit next to her and lean on her shoulder. Our tiredness is contagious. Rocinoll keeps cleaning, but she makes no sound. And, oh, I just really wanna kiss her.  


When she’s done cleaning, she puts her stuff in her bag and drops it at the foot of the bed, but she keeps the pipe on her lap. Following her, I stay true to my other childhood nickname, “Horse Legs Dande,” and lunge across the bed to do the same with my bag. Usually she’d turn to me and laugh, then it’d be so perfect that I’ll hug her and then whisper to her ear—the one with the little earring—I’ll finally whisper to her ear, “Rocinoll, thank you, Rocinoll…”  


Except she doesn’t laugh. And she doesn’t look at me. I’m climbing back onto the bed and to her side and I wrap an arm around her waist, and she’s just staring at her feet for some reason. I can’t see how she’s feeling under her goggles. I could just pull them down and get it over with, but it’s too mean and too dangerous. Losing this moment to that would suck.  


And I’m rolling the words around in my thoughts again when suddenly she cups one hand around my cheek and the other hand on my shoulder. And we look at each other for a moment. She puts her hands on her goggles so I know to close my eyes. Then she pulls herself up to kiss me.  


She breaks the kiss but leaves her hand on my shoulder before slowly sliding it off. Quickly, she puts her goggles back on and sighs. “Sorry about that,” she says. “I’ve just been kinda tired.”  


And I reopen my eyes. And Rocinoll’s hair bunches up around her ear as she rests her head on my shoulder. The rise and fall of her chest, it’s slower than usual so her breathing’s not so loud.  


Listen.  


You know, I’ve tried listening too much already.  


Listen to the harp that I probably won’t ever hear.  


I try it again though, to listen along with her, because I want her to be right.  


And she gets so quiet. I still don’t hear the harp, but instead, she delivers it to me: she starts humming again. But it’s not the local Litus desert tune from earlier, no. It’s a tune I’ve never heard before, not from anywhere, no way, not from Litus or Medius or Marlayus or anywhere.  


No one in my life has ever used—listen: used, not played—a stringed harp, a magical, lightning-generating relic of a stringed harp, except for Hírondel. And when Híron got executed at the guillotine, the Medians called them “Rivalis.” While the Divine Knights dragged them away from their hiding spot in Atruum’s sacred Den, bleeding, chronically-dumb me, with Rocinoll in my arms, I saw Híron drop something gold and shiny from under their cloak and onto the hard red dirt. But Rocinoll, she just got freed from her captor and yet she was crying. We couldn’t leave until she got that trinket. And after I snatched it for her, she tucked it away in her robes, and I haven’t seen it since.  


Rocinoll and me and Alouette and Milan, we were the mercenaries enlisted to apprehend Rivalis. Except we found out that Hírondel wasn’t the right guy, but the Divine Family didn’t let us have a say once they got turned in, no way, because they’re a Dragonblood and self-defense isn’t a valid pardon for us. And somehow it’s even less for half-Dragonbloods like them and Rocinoll. So last month, Rocinoll and me, we had to watch Híron’s execution. We wore big rags with hoods so the Medians couldn’t see our white hair, and we carried incense sticks in our bags so they wouldn’t catch our Dragonblood scent. And we pushed ourselves through the crowds just enough for a clearing, with me holding my girlfriend by the shoulders and having her in front of me. Far away over there was Híron clamped down, this short baby-faced kid, bent over on the stocks under the high-suspended blade with the sun making their horns glow gold and sickly. From under her rags, Rocinoll slipped her little wand out of her sleeve and pointed it at the convicted bandit. Her wand swayed like a heavy pendulum in time to a song I couldn’t hear, and her other hand clutched onto something within her chest. Hírondel somehow found us and stared at us through the opening. The crowd melted away. And when the Divine Knights called to drop the blade, Rocinoll’s arm fell, and she turned and buried herself in my chest when the metal crashed into flesh.  


In the room again, Rocinoll continues humming the obscure tune like its smoke wafting out a pipe. Then she gets quiet again. “I’m just tired,” she repeats to me. “Just tired…” All the while she taps her glowing wand on her pipe to a rhythm I can’t hear. And again, with her at my side, we’re alone and together. Alone and together.  


So, speak.  


Speak to her about it all.  


Speak to her and tell her that you love her.  


So I try that. And I get so close to her ear that I feel it getting warm… only for me to straight-up blow into it.  


Of course she screams into my face as she pushes herself back and holds her pipe out in front of her with the blunt golden-brass side facing forward. Her earring flicks up and the arms of her dragon mutation nearly jab me with their palms. She looks at me with her free hand over her ear and I’m leaning back away from her. Her left eye, the one with the blinding Celestial stigmata, it starts twitching from under her goggles and my heart starts thumping against my chest.  


Oh, I didn’t even talk and I already messed up. So I smile like I meant it.  


But Rocinoll takes a big breath. “Where,” she asks, “where’d it go?”  


I raise an eyebrow.  


“I can’t hear it anymore,” she says, her voice rising. “Where’d it go?”  


I almost say, “I just wanna go to bed,” but that doesn’t sound like a good first sentence. So I just shrug at her.  


And she takes her pipe and holds it upright with a fist, scraping the top of the mouthpiece with her bottom teeth. She swerves her head from left to right like she’s chasing some invisible fly, like she’s looking for some invisible ghost. Then with the same heart-stop intuition as when I saw her fallen on the banner, she pipes up and clings to my shoulders, shaking, and she presses herself against me so tightly that I feel something solid against her collar area.  


Listen: don’t take this too weird. But her collar’s wide enough that I peek under it and see something thick and gold and shiny, with little strings, attached to a necklace under her cloak. And clinging to my shoulders, Rocinoll whispers, “You…” She whispers, “You, Dan… You never heard it, did you?”  


My heart’s still beating too hard as I take my hand and smooth out her hair. I shake my head and, still holding onto me, she tells me, “Oh…” She turns her head to the side and presses her ear against my heart, and her big pink dragon mutation starts to wrap its arms gently around my head, embracing me.  


Rocinoll tells me, “I love you,” but my heart’s beating so hard that I don’t hear her say “but.”  


The sensation of her mutation’s arms around me paralyzes me, secures me to look straight forward at the jagged teeth and wide red eyes of her dragon hat. She pulls the front of her goggles down around her neck so I know not to look at her. The sting of her stigmata would hurt too much, she told me once. But with the sadness in her face, I haven’t been able to look at her much the same way since Hírondel’s execution.  


Rocinoll sighs, then whispers, “Sorry.” And a little louder, she repeats, “Sorry.” She says, “You remember that bandit Hírondel?” and I dip my chin at her. “I was just, y’know, thinking about them,” she tells me, “because I thought I heard their song for a second there.” She pauses. Then with a mellow giggle, she adds, “So I’m sorry for freaking you out, Dan. It’s just a really beautiful song…”  


My forehead gets hot. In an attempt to get her to change her mind, with my eyes shut, I duck my head low enough to boop her nose with mine, but she moves out of the way. She puts on a tremolo when she stutters, “I-I-I-I…”  


Then she bursts into tears.  


“I wish they weren’t killed!” she cries. And I don’t dare to look at her when she sniffs and she says, “They were only fourteen. They were just, just like me. They were just like me and they loved me, Dan. They loved me too much and I-I-I-I…” She wipes her tears with the back of her fingers as her other hand grips my arm tighter. The pipe slips off her lap and drops hard to the floor like it just jumped off a sill and dipped onto a banner in a futile attempt to chase some dying stars. Her wand falls after it, and the glow on its tip sinks and lights up the floor in a patch of bright white. Between me and her dragon mutation, it’s purple-dark.  


After the noise of the clang settles down, Rocinoll takes a big gulp. “I get it if you hate me after this,” she says, choking back on her tears. I hear the shuffle as she reaches into her cloak’s collar and pulls out the trinket: a miniature golden harp. It shines yellow and sickly with the metallic parts having the same grooves as Hírondel’s horns. And so she pleads, “Can I tell you?” She pleads, “Can I tell you? Can I tell you about them? It’s haunting me.” She repeats, “Haunting.”  


Since it would suck to shake no, I just nod like usual. And with her and her dragon mutation wrapping their arms around me, with no banner to cushion what she’s about to say, she whispers, “Okay.” She whispers, “They kissed me.”  


I’m not a monster. I’m not the chicken-elephant-horse-snake chimera my peers in the dojo keep comparing me to. But when she says that, I pucker in my lips and push my teeth together on them to keep my wits in check. And on top of that, I’m sinking my mouth deeper into my bandana as she asks me, “Dan, are you okay?” like I can reply. What I wanna ask her is if she kissed them back, like that’s gonna mend this, but that’s a horrible first sentence to go off on.  


Listen: Rocinoll knows that I wanna ask her why, so she tells me that it’s all because of Hírondel’s grandma, Old Lady Gardenia. That’s what they called her. The sexy-legs, funny-flirting, flower-sniffing kind of grandma, apparently. And since Hírondel’s only fourteen and has been living at least five-something years of that time in a hidden basement with this grandma, of course they don’t know any better. “They told me that they didn’t wanna die without knowing what it’s like to kiss someone,” Rocinoll tells me. “They really said that, they really did.” She sucks in some air and the tremolo comes back as she says, “So I-I-I-I… I knew they were going to die when I heard the Knights marching in the forest so near us… So I was happy to find that they passed us by that night…”  


And listen: she tells me how Hírondel was not only a mechanic, not only a childhood friend of hers back in her mom’s library, but—lo and behold—they can actually play the harp that they keep stabbing foes with. And, of course, they played it for her. “On the night we found the real Rivalis,” Rocinoll tells me, “after they… after Rivalis died, y’know… Hírondel took out their harp for one last time.” She stops. “I have to emphasize,” she spits, “they were never a serial killer.”  


I nod slowly.  


“Y’know, the Divine Knights…” she breathes. “It was because of the Divine Knights, that’s why.” She shudders. “I didn’t hear so many of them were coming for them that night, but they did…” As her voice trails off, she falls into my chest, gentle as the night wind. She closes her eyes and mumbles, “I can hear it again.”  


A low, droning growl escapes from my mouth.  


Her shoulders brace up. “All of a sudden, they just told me, ‘I don’t wanna live no more!’” she yells. After seeing Rivalis’s dead body on the floor, the dead body clutching a letter to the heart, Hírondel stood upon a rock thrice their height with their golden harp in hand, a bloodied mess. “I-I-I-I could’ve told them to stop,” she stammers. “I-I-I-I… I think they died for me.”  


She pauses. “So they play the harp,” she says. “And they play the harp, and they play the harp, and they play the harp… And all the while I don’t realize the music’s getting louder, and the marches are getting closer… So when they finish their song, they point at the mouth of the cave and tell me to run.”  


That Hírondel, this evocation of an innocent dead kid, it pangs me in the heart harder than a body landing on the floor from four stories high. Because I know I’ll never be like them, dying in the heat of some passion too late to comprehend. They knew, _knew_ , the cost—for her, for me, and the worst for themselves—they knew that the Knights were going to find them so fast if they played, and they played anyway. At fourteen years old, and fourteen forever.  


Rocinoll and me, we sit in silence. She listens. I don’t. Because I still can’t friggin’ hear it. A jaw harp, a stringed harp, some singing, some crying—I can’t hear it.  


I look back to the harp trinket dangling from her neck. From under my bandana, I’m pursing my lips and cringing. It’s like how I still have Ena’s bloodied blue scarf, stored away in my bag, as my secret memory of him until I die. And here I am, feeling some cool sensation coming down my neck, like fingers walking down my back, that maybe some spirit’s watching us in this purple darkness as the light of her wand on the floor wicks out. She doesn’t replenish it. When my eyes adjust, the dim red eyes of her mutation are staring right directly at me.  


Carefully, I try to reach my arms out, to put them around her into a big hug. But my arms tremble too much with an invisible tremolo in the Litus night air, and I barely clasp my hands on her shoulders when I suck in a big breath.  


And I laugh without any sound. Hysterically. Throwing my head back. Like a whinnying horse, a whinnying Horse Legs Dande, except that horse has no vocal cords, no more.  


Rocinoll sinks back. “Dande,” she breathes, “do you still love me?” She yanks the trinket off and thrusts it into my chest. “Can I give this to you?” she begs. “So you can believe me?”  


I’m covering my eyes with a hand and clutching the trinket with the other as invisible tears soak down my face. Out of my scarf now, my mouth’s open like a hee-haw hee-haw prick who doesn’t know how else to respond properly, who can’t vocalize his word and wants to believe his girlfriend so bad but can’t because gods, gods, he doesn’t want another ghost tailing after him, not like last time, no way, not again anymore.  


She balls her soft hand into a hard fist, reels back, and punches me, lightly, right in the heart. “Gods,” she spits, “gods.” She punches me again.  


I slink the necklace around my neck. Then, while she’s mid-punch, I bring myself down like a striking serpent to hug her, shakily. Here I am. I’ve turned to her and laughed at her, then it would’ve been so perfect that I’m hugging her and then I’ll whisper to her ear—the one with the little earring—I’ll finally friggin’ whisper to her ear, ”Rocinoll, yes, Rocinoll…”  


And with the sensation of the back of my windpipe shoving up with mucus, only a nasty growling sound comes out of my mouth. And it will never sound as good, it can’t sound as good… as the harp music wafting through the air from out the door.  


I freeze, then slowly retract from my hug. Rocinoll keeps one hand on top of mine as I gradually slip away from the red eyes staring at me. She rubs her eyes, keeping a hand over the Celestial stigmata on her left. Her mouth opens like she’s gonna say something to me while I’m staring, crawling on the bed, in the direction of the ironwood door, expecting some enchanted smoke to come in for a grand spirit’s entrance. But she says nothing to me. Like it’s traveling all over the sands of Litus, the harp tune, it melts away the moment I plant my purple legs on the clay floor.  


When I turn back around, the harp trinket swerves along with the motion and hits me in the chest. I see Rocinoll tucked over on her side, facing away from me, with her goggles and wand next to her pillow and her pipe away in her bag. Her shoes are off and her pink dragon hat’s retracted so it’s easy for her to lie down on the pillow and go fast to sleep.  


I suppress the mutation of my legs and let out a long sigh, then I climb into bed after her. She’s the little spoon and I’m the big one. It’s better for her to sleep now, after she’s let go of all of it, given it to me to hold for now.  


Listen.  


And here, clutching the trinket, I close my eyes.  


Now, listen to the harp that I now know is real.

  
  
  


In the dead of night, I hop off the bed and make for the door. When I put my claws to it, I push it slowly so the creaking isn’t super loud. My suppressed mutation, it’s still wrapped around my legs like a thick, purple, stone skin, but out here in the Litus midnight, it doesn’t glow as purple or make as loud of a tapping noise compared to earlier.  


So I open the door and the harp tune comes to me again. It echoes through the building, left and right. But this time, amongst the dark purple, in front of me way over there, all the way across the window and beyond the wooden poles extruding from the wall, is the glowing, golden silhouette of a horned kid. And I don’t see their feet at first, but as I move closer and jump onto the sill, ready to dive after them, I see that they’re floating, standing well offset from the sill and the poles. As my eyes adjust, it becomes clear that Hírondel’s holding and strumming an arm-long harp in hand.  


As they’re strumming, the spirit looks at me—at least I think they’re looking at me with how blinding their form is—and they say, “You found me.” They say, “You must want a service from me. But there’s no service I can do for you no more.”  


The smoke treatment couldn’t have dealt with this guy. They don’t count as a bad spirit, no way. Listen: the second sentence they said sounds rehearsed, like for all their fourteen years, maybe, they had to say those words fourteen times over to every client in their shop before their reputation went sour. And listen: it doesn’t seem like this spirit caught my drift when I shook my head because they keep strumming and strumming. “This count as a service?” they ask me. “I hope my work is fulfilling to you.”  


Maybe they’re not talking to _me_. Maybe they’re just _talking_. And this talking, it gets me jealous while I get moving with the harp trinket still beating against my chest. As I hop off the sill and onto the wooden poles, chronically-silly me, needing to put my right foot in front of my left, like a cat, as much as possible I’m trying to keep perfectly still with my eyes fixated on this supernatural being.  


When I reach my hand out, how the music feels wafting through my fingers, it’s enchanted smoke mixed with the Litus desert winds. And I know I’ve been listening too much already, but I can’t let this guy down.  


Listen.  


Hírondel makes one last strum, one final note, a big one where they swing their arm all the way out, then they point at the ironwood door behind me. I don’t turn around, but they start opening their mouth like they’re yelling, “Run!” Except I hear nothing but the final note reverberating through the cosmos.  


And listen.  


I inch closer again, still with my hand outreached, because their pointing hand relaxes into a splayed hand. Purple mixing with yellow, opposite colors, my hand wraps in electrifying yellow and starts vibrating as I pull my fingers in. The bolts emanating from this spirit, it zips around my arm, up my shoulder, down my collarbone, and into the golden harp trinket dangling from around my neck. And as this is happening, Hírondel’s spirit starts melting away, from their feet to their horns. But the arm-long harp they were holding gets left behind, and the arm lifting it up is about to disappear.  


Going fast, despite the lateness of the night, I reach both my hands out and reel in the big golden harp while I’m still trying to balance on this horizontal wooden pole. Now my left leg’s trying to be in front of my right, and my right’s trying to be in front of my left, switching and hopping from one foot to another, so I’m not able to keep my balance so good. And I’m clutching this big harp that just got deposited by this fragment of a spirit. So before I black out, the harp trinket around my neck, it settles back from blinding yellow to its usual color, except for a single string.  


And then I wake up curled over on my side, pressing onto a hot, woven material.  


My skin’s simmering under the heat of the Litus desert sun. My exposed arm’s outstretched over, embracing the harp I can no longer see. Chronically-sleepy me, I barely see Rocinoll’s gentle self looking down at me… from four stories high. And she starts running down to get me, curled up sleeping all night on the banner that somehow didn’t collapse under my weight. But the important thing is that the harp trinket with its single glowing string is still around my neck. For Rocinoll _and_ for Hírondel.  


So I retract my claws, pull the front of my bandana down, and stick three fingers to my throat. Then I turn over to the opposite side and begin humming Hírondel’s song.


End file.
